Studio Tops

Focusing on glass, steel and leatherwork, Tops’ process is always led by materials – how they behave and how they might surprise her. She sees them as “active agents” with their own properties and histories that are inseparable from the pieces’ final form and meaning. Much of her work begins in the studio, where she allows ideas to evolve through hands-on making and experimentation. “It’s about being curious about the material and seeing where it can take you in different ways, sculpturally and formally,” she explains. “The act of doing is the thing that leads me from one object to another. It’s an eternal kind of curiosity.”

This openness has given her work its recognisable character, defined by geometric forms, striking proportions and a play with dualities: rigid and soft, heavy and light. “When I was making more sculpture than anything, one thing I thought about a lot was things that are beautifully ugly,” she says. “I like things that have a tension point or something that is intriguing but that’s also a little bit off and curious in some way. It’s not just an aesthetically pleasing object, but there is some sort of bend or twist to it that I enjoy.” That tension – what she calls “comfortable discomfort” – runs through many of her pieces.

Leather, in particular, is central to this exploration due to its physical and cultural complexity. “What interests me now is the subversive nature of it,” she says. “There’s some politics around it. There’s a long history of it being quite a rudimentary material, but it’s also an elevated, luxury material. There’s so many different forms that it comes in, and it’s so malleable in many ways. You can lean into its structural hardness or its suppleness, the way that it takes on form or the way that it reflects light.”

Her Dromen and Soloist collections, for instance, highlight this push and pull. The Dromen bench pairs a blackened steel frame with a voluminous black leather cushion; the Soloist stool and leather low table rely on taut, intersecting parts that appear both architectural and organic. These leather pieces accompany the Soloist Cube chair – a blackened steel cube with a simple scooped subtraction for a seat. Many of the works hold a subtle erotic charge, shaped by the material’s inherent presence. “There’s definitely a grungy, sexy, after-dark feeling with leather as well,” she says. “It’s very tactile and sensual.”

Tops has continued to experiment with the materiality of the Cube chair. At Melbourne Design Week in 2025, she created a new iteration, Cube chair 02, for the ‘Low Key’ exhibition presented by Fiona Lynch Office. It uses hand-dyed and hand-stitched leather to mimic the appearance of steel – a trick of perception that reveals itself only when interacted with. “It’s more like a prism subtraction from form,” she says, “and then it integrates into a soft element where you actually sit into.” For the ‘Luminosity’ exhibition at Craft Victoria, she worked with a fabricator to create a fibreglass version which, when illuminated, acts as lighting, furniture and sculpture in one.

In her lighting practice, Tops is often drawn to kangaroo vellum. The material’s unique qualities – its thinness, translucency and durability – sit alongside a deeper awareness of the ethics of working with animal hides. “The hides are sourced from a nationwide culling process,” she explains. “What’s amazing about kangaroos is that they’re endemic and indigenous to this country. It’s a soft-footed animal, so it’s creating a lower impact on the environment. They’re not killed for the leather – it’s actually part of a different system that we are benefiting from, or recycling out of.”

As the practice approaches its 10th year, Tops remains open to new opportunities and possibilities, even as she balances design work with her other roles as a fabricator and technical rigger. For now, the momentum of making – and the materials that lead her from one idea to the next – continue to push the evolving design language of Studio Tops into new realms.